Dakota Johnson leads an often smart yet often frustrating romcom that’s lushly made but awkwardly written
In the style of Lucy, Dakota Johnson’s shrewd matchmaker in Celine Song’s new film Materialists, I’ll be blunt: dating is tough these days. It’s probably always been tough, even back when the first couple of cave people tried it out – a scenario Song, who broke out with the winning naturalism and precise sensitivity of her 2023 debut Past Lives, imagines in bizarre bookends to her otherwise naturalistic, sharp-eyed romcom of modern love in New York. One needn’t look back quite so far, but marriage, as Lucy puts it to a skittish client minutes before her very expensive wedding, has always been a business transaction – once a couple of goats between families, then a dowry, now a more amorphous negotiation of intangible and material assets. To date today is to endure a slog of judgments, preferences, logistics and rejection that seem to only intensify the longer you stay on the market, as they say.
And they say it a lot; Lucy and her ilk, a boutique matchmaking firm with a downtown office, are fluent in the depersonalized business-speak of the dating economy. They traffic in asset optimization and management, seeking a “good match” that “checks all our boxes”, navigating “non-negotiables” and “dealbreakers” that often involve dollar signs. (This being a paid matchmaker, the clientele skews rich.) Whereas Past Lives achingly refracted the sublime yearning of childhood sweethearts through the practicalities of distance, time and maturity, Song’s sophomore feature hammers the desires of its matchmaker and her many clients through a brutal realism, to a fascinating, if occasionally off-putting, effect.
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